Greenstrings
All Star
Not if that corruption is built into the complexities of the system and can be legitimized. You are hugely underestimating the extent to which this is common practice.You think loopholes and stuff were used to cook every team's books? It doesn't take an internal investigation to figure out how teams don't make money. It would take a lot of corruption to hide that lie just to NOT play games that (with supposed loopholes) make you money anyway.
For better or worse exploiting loopholes isn't seen as cooking the books, it's just another tool organizations can use to appear as robust or infirm as they think best suits their interests. That being said whether or not they lost money is immaterial if the league on the whole is still profitable, the thing to take away is that owners desire better profit margins.
The owners know they stand to save more money in the long run by suppressing player salaries than they would have gained from those missed games and that lie/untruth/half-truth is what facilitated the reduction of the players BRI share from 57% to 51% in 2011.

